Natural Language Processing Market Insights
Adam Arrighi – MBN Solutions 07703110670
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing has quickly become one of the most in demand specialities within data
science in the last few years. This document aims to give you some insights on interesting
applications of NLP, market trends and competitor insights.
Large Enterprises
Large enterprises are expanding their longstanding centralised data science/ai functions by
supplementing them with specialised niche sub teams. NLP, computer vision and speech/audio are
the main areas of focus. Threat identification and risk mitigation are main applications with insurers
looking to predict fraudulent claims, investment houses scraping the web for info that will affect their
strategies and businesses in most industries diving into text to assess consumer satisfaction and react
accordingly. The main hiring trends show clients are looking for specific Phds (NLP, Information
Extraction, Informatics etc), candidates with a list of publications and/or conference speaking
experience. The barrier to entry is high however so are the salaries with an average Senior Data
Scientist being paid £90-110Kbase
Starts Ups
By far the busiest and most interesting space is the start-up market with so many ideas and
applications popping up all the time, I’ve selected 1 to highlight. Other areas include; financial crime,
healthcare, invoicing, customer feedback and many more
Fake News is a hugely popular topic and one of my clients is accelerating ahead of the pack having
grown from 4-70 people in 2 years, being engaged to protect a social media giant’s platform during
the Indian election and reengaged for the US 2020 elections. After delivering 3 NLP PhDs to this
business they have begun to tackle the issue of misinformation and harmful content from another
angle, using computer vision to identify ‘deepfakes’ and images. Having hired 2 great vision
specialists, I have now been tasked with delivering experts in Natural Language Understanding and
linguistics.
Trends/Market Info
With such a competitive market, visa sponsorship has become more common with many clients
opting to increase the number of licenses they have for future hires.
Regional offices are becoming a popular way of reducing staff costs compared with London and
taking advantage of the excellent graduate talent becoming available across the UK. Some of the
hunting ground for budding NLP specialists include the Informatics and Computer Science
departments of Edinburgh, Sheffield and Leeds Universities.
If NLP is focus for yourself or your team, I am happy to make time for a confidential conversation.